A STUDY OF THE ECO COSMOPOLITANISM AS PORTRAYED IN THE NOVEL, THE GUN ISLAND BY AMITAV GHOSH (2025)

Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environmentalism

Journal Article, 2024

Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019), in addressing the planetary scale of the climate crisis, gestures to the possibility of, and the imperative for, multispecies as well as multi-ethnic and cross-cultural cooperation as a way of facing climate change. The parallel that Ghosh draws between human and animal migrations, resulting from climate change, underlines the novel's emphasis on multispecies climate justice. By connecting the refugee influx into the Western world to the environmental crisis beyond the West, the novel also concerns itself with social, racial, and historical injustices, drawing attention to the role of European colonization and the present-day global capitalism in escalating the climate crisis. I discuss the characteristics of environmentalism that I identify within Gun Island using the term "planetary environmentalism." This kind of environmentalism extends beyond any geographical boundary created by humans, as borders lose their meaning when the future of the whole planet is at threat. I argue that the novel, through planetary environmentalism, raises a cry for multispecies justice as a question of multispecies survival to face the challenges of the planetary crisis caused by climate change.

Revisiting Popular Bengali Folklores to Re-imagine the Past and Engage with the Present: Gun Island and the Tribulations of Climate Change

University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2021

Amitav Ghosh, in his 2019 novel Gun Island chooses to discourse on the antipathetic relation of human progress and the environment manifested as climate change. In this remarkable novel Ghosh visits two popular Bengali folklores: Manasa Devi – a snake goddess, and Chand Sawdagor – a merchant who was cursed by the snake goddess, and utilizes the stories to re-imagine a past in which certain events take place that eerily parallels the present, especially the issue of climate change. Ghosh’s appropriation of ideas from the epic Manasa Mangal Kabyo – from the canon of Bengali folklore – and shaping them to include pressing contemporary climate issues that oppress individuals, environs, animal habitats, and global major cities around the world, invest the thesis of the novel with global significance. Ghosh transmutes the folklores by reimagining the past, so they come to inform a global scene: dictating and vindicating outcomes all over the world. Ghosh concludes that absence of a global...

The Era of Environmental Derangement: Witnessing Climate Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

2021

Drawing on Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) together with his nonfictional The Great Derangement (2016), the article strives to present that while advancing endless desires, human-centric culture and the idea of ‘good life’ drive climate change and environmental deterioration. It seeks to enumerate the devastating consequences of changing climatic conditions and degenerating ecosystems and their cumulative impacts on the humankind and non-human world. It aims to locate how human life at the margins has been affected by these cataclysmic consequences through analysing Ghosh’s Gun Island. It attempts to show that human interventions had significantly fuelled the global climate crisis in the seventeenth century, decoding the myth of Bonduki Sadagar that Ghosh identifies in Gun Island.

Island and Refugees Exploring the Intersections of Environmental and Social Justice in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (SH&SS), 2025

Gun Island by amitav ghosh investigates problems of race, migration and ecology. using a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, one might examine how the author challenges the western anthropocentric notion of human subjectivity that has been created by modernism and historical processes by presenting nonhuman actors. This study examines how ghosh uses environmental themes to discover subversive agreements in the book and narrative content of the postcolonial nonhuman subject matter. This research paper examines how the context of postcolonialism has disrupted the way borders are constructed. it does this by projecting an otherworldly possibility through an immaterial myth that suggests there exists an interconnectedness between living and nonliving things. The work of amitav ghosh also provides a thorough examination through the myth of manasa devi through the invisible borders. This article centres on the social economic, political and climate factors that contribute to the outcomes of the unauthorised movement of the impoverished individuals depicted in the text taken for research.

The Crisis of Climate and Immigration in Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island

Litera: Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, 2021

Human migration, a socio-political phenomenon in contemporary times, refers to the journey of people across international borders or within their own country. Such journeys arise from varied ecological, social, political, religious, and economic factors. "In this globalize (sic) world, where everything seems to be global, migration is also changing its nature and forms which it takes" (UKEssays, 2018, para. 4). Even though human migration is not new, "undocumented, unauthorized, or illegal migration is a recent phenomenon" (Donato & Massey, 2016, p. 9). Illegal immigrants who undergo political unrest and social turmoil during migration are often sufferers of identity crisis, imprisonment, torture, and exploitation through bonded labour. Falsification of identity papers, drug and arms trafficking, forced prostitution, and human trafficking are some salient features of undocumented migration throughout the world. Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019) undertakes an exploratory journey into the present globalized world of anthropogenic climate metamorphoses that trigger excruciating illegal migrations from the Indian Sundarbans, the mangrove region. It is also the saga of many other undocumented migrants from various developing countries, who illegally migrate to the West in search of employment and opportunity but miserably fall victims to human trafficking, xenophobia, and imprisonment. The paper focuses on the socioeconomic , political, and climatological reasons for, and the consequences of, the illegal migrations of the underprivileged people portrayed in the text under discussion, by situating them within the framework of the contemporary era of capitalist globalization.

Handcuffed to Nature: An Ecocritical Approach to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Literary Oracle – ISSN: 2348-4772 – Vol.6, Issue 1, 2022

Nature has become a constant source of stimulation for the authors for generations. Numerous literary creations have been associated with the faultless natural ambience of the universe. But unlike environmentalists, the writers of literary texts have little or no scope to raise a protest against the degradation of the environment. Very few writers have been preoccupied with the thought of environment in their texts and that is the main cause of the existence of an insufficient number of literary texts having environmental issues. In the late 1980s in the United States and later on in the 1990s in the United Kingdom, an emergent movement has started to study the intrinsic relationship between literary texts and the environment. This study is defined as ‘eco-criticism’ or ‘green studies’. Ecocriticism analyzes the role that the natural environment plays in the imagination of a cultural community at a specific moment. In this paper, I would like to focus on the ambiance of the debate that propagated the acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh to write a new non-fictional work The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable in 2016. This is a marvelous volume from Ghosh that evenly assesses and demonstrates the confines of human consideration when it comes to the apprehension of environmental disasters. This is a grave issue that reflects our ‘deranged’ manners of socio-economic as well as political matters through several themes like history, politics, and literature. Amitav Ghosh tries to answer the relevant questions: why is serious fiction reluctant to deal with climate change and environmental issues? If it does, then why is it immediately classified as science-fiction or relegated to subgenre literature? Answering some of the assumptions implied in Ghosh’s discourse, it is possible to situate his text and the relevance of climate change within our literary and philosophical discourse and to re-think our cultural and environmental policies and instructive engagement.

Anthropocene and Ecoprecarity: Indigenous lives in Pankaj Sekhsaria's The Last Wave: An Island Novel

Dogo Rangsang Research Journal, 2022

The planetary ecosystem is one of the most interconnected systems of all. But modern man's exploitation of natural resources has severely affected this ecosystem by taking a toll on its non-human counterparts. Much of this has happened under the garb of developmental projects designed by the capitalist economy initiated by European colonisers. At some point in the twentieth century, many writers began considering the harsh realities of environmental disasters and their impact on society. Pankaj Sekhsaria is one of the prominent environmental activists who have voiced concerns relating to the perils of developmental activities on indigenous communities and nonhuman entities in India's Andaman and the Nicobar Islands. Sekhsaria maps the transformation of the Islands right from the first convict settlement in Port Blair in the late 1850s to the present day condition when the indigenous population and wildlife including flora and fauna have waned off under a load of the modern transformation. Following the settlement, the process of ecological hazards kept spiralling with the passing of each decade. Biodiversity depletion, alteration of ecology, and Jarawa vulnerability find primary significance in the novel. This paper argues that the depletion of natural resources and destruction of indigenous space as conceived in the novel are proportionate to the developmental projects carried out in the islands as an extension of the postcolonial modernising schema. Within the framework of Ecocriticism, this paper brings out the eco-sensibility of an environmental activist delineated through a creative text.

Ecofeminism during Pandemic: A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s Sundarbans Trilogy

European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies

As a distinguished novelist and an eminent anthropologist, Amitav Ghosh exhibits his deepest concern about the inability of the present generation to deal with the crisis of climate change in literature. In The Great Derangement, he forecasts the looming disaster that may arise from such carelessness. His Sundarbans trilogy (The Hungry Tide, Jungle Nama, Gun Island) surpasses all his previous works as he combines his personal voice with a factual and accurate description of the mangrove forest. In his novels, he notes that the emission of carbon dioxide, discharge of dangerous levels of methane, greenhouses gases by some developed countries, and the resulting rise of sea levels increase the frequency of natural disasters that jeopardize the natural phenomenon of the Sundarbans-the biggest mangrove forest of the world. Thus, Ghosh’s novels are intended to play a significant role in raising South Asian consciousness about climate change at a time when the pandemic becomes a life-threa...

Riots, Crowds and the Collective in Amitav Ghosh's Political Imagination. From The Shadow Lines to Gun Island

Crossing the Shadow Lines : Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic, 2020

This article, using the riots in The Shadow Lines (1988) as a point of departure, maps a more general system of representations of multitudes within Amitav Ghosh's work. Its implications, in turn, can shed light on Ghosh's relationship with the idea of collectivity, which is more fraught with tensions and ambivalence than it may initially appear. More precisely, I argue that Ghosh's work is deeply concerned with the various ways in which collectivities, masses and gatherings of different kinds can affect, enhance, diminish or threaten individual existences, and tries to find a reconciliation between the collectivity and the individual. As a result of these anxieties, Ghosh tends to represent crowds and multitudes chiefly in two modes: as an anonymous, dehumanized and threatening mass; or as a community of individuals bound together by spontaneous human solidarity. In turn, this tends to exclude from his imaginative horizon certain kinds of collectivities that do not fit in either of the two modes, such as various kinds of explicitly politically engaged movements. Besides The Shadow Lines-the moment in which Ghosh lays the foundations of this system of representations-, the article considers other works of fiction and non-fiction-most notably to show how the characteristics of this system have remained consistent throughout Ghosh's career. The point of arrival, finally, is Ghosh's recent work on climate change and migration-The Great Derangement (2016) and Gun Island (2019)-in which the shortcomings of this system of representations, as regards Ghosh's intervention in current public debates, come to light with particular clarity.

Ecological Crisis in Amitav Ghosh’s the Great Derangement

Journal of emerging technologies and innovative research, 2021

Climate change is nowadays affecting every country in the world. Climate change is disrupted national economies and affecting lives, people, communities and countries. People are experience in the significant impacts of climate change and which include changing weather patterns, rising sea level, and more extreme weather events. The poorest and most vulnerable people are being affected in the climate change. Global policy making nowadays is to conflict the harmful effects of climate change on our environment. Climate change as an occurrence has grabbed the attention of the whole world, because it is something that mankind has been held responsible for Earth. Earth climate is always changing, in the last hundred years; earth is climate has changed significantly. The earth is temperature has become heater than before and it has had almost immediate special effects on coastal areas, small islands, food security and health. The entire problem of climate change has more to do with the way human beings have been conducting their lives. 'Derangement' means a state of mental disturbance and disorientation or the act of disturbing the mind or body.